Squeaky Clean Peaceable Kingdom

Cleanliness is next to godliness, it is said. This wasn't a spiritual mission, just a disinfecting one. A preschooler licked and sucked the pinkish bear's feet. I don't want to contemplate the reasons for this action. I just want to send the whole jungle through the carwash.

Now that the plastic animals are disinfected, please join me in singing, "The pink bear went through the dishwasher, the pink bear went through the dishwasher, the pink bear went through the dishwasher to see what she could see.

Quaker preacher Edward Hicks painted over a hundred versions of "The Peaceable Kingdom." 1820 and his death. The theme for the paintings was Isaiah chapter eleven. If you squint just right, you can see the box of Cascade in about thirty-three versions.



© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Christmas spider and New Years back-up

Almost stood on my head to get a photo of a small spider inside a big flower pot of sedum. The angle of the web made it impossible for me to see the spider's marking with my own eye, so I did photographer contortions to get an image. What a fun surprise to discover the Christmas tree shape with snow on the ground!

Back in January I made two New Years resolutions. These were not save-the-whales-and-lose-fifty-pounds lofty goals, although I did plan to follow through on them with "firm determination". My planned course of action called for improved care of my teeth, and frequent backing-up of my computer files.

Four-plus months later, I'm amazed that I've really implemented those two little resolutions. Bet this is the first time I can even remember my resolutions by mid-May!

Now when I wake up at 4:40 a.m. and can't go back to sleep, I make back-up cds of my computer files. Sometimes the thought of hauling myself out of bed to back-up the computer is enough to solve the 4:40 insomnia. If it isn't, at least I'm eliminating computer crash anxiety as a wee hours worry.

"Take better care of my teeth" is a pretty subjective resolution. My dentist's hygenist will tell me if I've succeeded. My Oral B Vitality Braun electric toothbrush is definitely a step in the right direction. Okay, that's probably too much information!

Still, if I ever become the elderly blue-haired owner of an obese, low and long-haired, yippy, irritable condo dog of the Pomeranian or Spitz type, I will name it Gingivitis. Its puppies will be called Swish, Floss, Tartar, Plaque, and the runt, Hyperactive Gag Reflex.

Perhaps computer back-up insomnia is more to be desired than fat dental Pomeranian nightmares. Next time I see 4:40, I'll meditate on the Christmas tree spider, and pop Vince Guaraldi into the cd player.



© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Totebags Remove Anxiety

This is not a snake oil medicine show, boys and squirrels, mothers and otters! I'm not selling magic elixirs or tonics. I just want you to step right up and learn how you, yes you, or the woman you love, can get rid of Perfect Purse anxiety.

This cure doesn't have Twelve Steps. You don't have to admit powerlessness over purses, although you may willingly confess that Perfect Purse Anxiety made your life unmanageable.

I used to worry a lot about having the Perfect Purse, or an Appropriate Purse For the Occasion, or an Acceptable Purse Given the Situation, or a Not Entirely Dreadful Even Though Terribly Embarrassing Purse From An Aesthetic Standpoint. I was not alone. Every woman I knew, and even one guy, had the same anxiety. That's why I'm glad to report there is a road out of this stress, and that road is paved with ...



TOTEBAGS!



A totebag tells the world that you are much too busy, and have far too much to carry, to worry about a little thing like a purse. When the going gets tough, the tough stuff their purse into their totebag along with everything else.

The healing power of totebags:

• The beauty of totebags is that they are all gifts and freebies. I don't have to make any decisions. Even the totebag I keep my totebags in was a gift.
• Totebags can restore a sense of empowerment to those crushed down by decades of purse abuse. I get a jolt of powerful electricity every time I walk into Albertsons with my totebag full of totebags. The cashiers and baggers look at me with shock and awe (and try to finagle an extra smoke break to avoid me).
• Totebags nestle within totebags within totebags. You can pull long strings of them out of your sleeve. "Rocky! Watch me pull a totebag out of my hat," says Bullwinkle.
• Totebags are not the possession of the owner any more than children are the possession of their parents or an unmarked umbrella leaning by the door during a downpour is reserved for the forgetful person who left it. Totebags belong to the cosmos.
• Totebags inspire generosity of spirit. You hand off a totebag to any visitor who has a lot to carry, knowing that someone will do the same for you. You are not personally invested in a totebag. Your self concept/ego/identity is not riding in a totebag like a third grade bully in a midway bumper car. You can afford to be magnanimous. Some other store will have a grand opening. Some other public radio station or magazine with reward subscribers.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I just finished reading Nora Ephron's piece about purses in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a paperback I had stuffed into my totebag.

The Totebag Remedy is absolutely Lennon-esque in its simplicity and healthful beauty:

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Gather ye totebags while ye may. Whole Foods is still a-flying. But this same upscale organic gourmet demographic with excess disposable income today tomorrow will be crying and whining into its cellphones.

A book of verses underneath the bough,

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou,

A sturdy totebag that is mine for now,

O, wilderness were paradise enow!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Return of the Jedi

Mother's Day weekend was busy with phone calls to coordinate the return of the knights to my small space station. When all three of them get back here, I may have to send them outside to practice with their light sabers just like in the olden days.

The first Jedi returns tonight. The second returns Wednesday. The third comes to visit the first two in June. I hope I don't turn into a Wookie when I need my school teacher beauty sleep, and the Jedi are in Mos Eisley cantina mode!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Cam Phone Spam Scram Gravy Ain't Wavy

Here in Plano voter interest in the municipal election is up one mild eyebrow twitch above the usual total apathy. We have a, gasp, openly gay candidate for city council. We have a $490 million school bond proposal when many families are cutting their driving and eating lots more beans.

Speaking of gas, the candidates have ALL figured out how to use automated annoying phone calls. I was home this afternoon because of school conference day, and the phone rang every five minutes with a robo-candidate urging me to vote.

Somehow, I got off the campaign track into a discussion about gravy. Growing up, it was a given that during any meal served with gravy someone would remark, "Scram gravy ain't wavy." What did it mean?

Googling "scram gravy" I learned that the expression probably derived from an old-timey newspaper comic about a fireman called "Smokey Stover". If you happen to remember anything from "Smokey Stover" about Molly freezing on the trolley*, PLEASE leave a comment! Dad and I have been as far up and down the sidewalk of Memory Lane as he can go pushing his walker, and I barely remember the comic in the Omaha Weird Herald.

As a kid in the Sixties, I believed that "scram gravy ain't wavy" was a jab at our neighbors who made lumpy gravy with flour and milk instead of using the inherently superior smooth cornstarch recipe seasoned with brown sauce. I have to laugh, but we kids must have had playground taunts like, "my mom's gravy is smoother than your mom's gravy!" It was an era of Meat and Potatoes.

Fritzi's Gravy

Yield: 2 cups


2 Tbsp fat drippings
2 cups hot water drained off the boiled potatoes you are going to mash
2 Tbsp Argo® Corn Starch
1/4 cup cold water
1 tsp Gravy Master or other brown sauce
Salt and pepper to taste

Remove all but 2 tablespoons fat drippings from roasting pan. Stir in hot water. Cook over medium heat, stirring to loosen browned bits. Remove from heat.


Put corn starch and water in a small jar with a tight lid, then shake until smooth; stir into pan. Add seasonings. Stirring constantly, bring to a boil over medium heat and boil 1 minute.

*Dad is probably thinking of Walt Kelly's Christmas classic:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley
Swaller dollar cauliflower Alleygaroo!
Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola Boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Country pickin' fingers

Don't park your double-wide in the Rose Garden, Bill. You weren't a horrible President, especially compared with Dubya. Nothing you and Monica did under the desk was any worse than what millions of good old boys and girls do in offices, Ford F-150s, and tacky motels every day. I just don't want another Tag Team Clinton mud-wrestling administration.

Should Hillary become the Democratic nominee by some weird twist of soap operatic amnesia fate, I will root for her greased pig in the 4-H grandstand against McCain's Hundred Years' War hog. But even then, Bill, please don't set your trailer up on cement blocks out there by that reflector pool!

I'll fix your flat tire Merle
Don't ya get your sweet country pickin' fingers all covered with erl
Cause you're a honky, I know, but Merle you got soul
And I'll fix your flat tire Merle

So, Bill, just set your Lazy Boy recliner out there on the lawn of your library and amp up the Pure Prairie League song. Leave the busted out washing machine on the porch. Don't make me cross state lines to explain it any clearer!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Credit Crunch Charleston

As we cut up our credit cards in this economic downturn/identity theft era, imagine what fabulous outfits we could create for dancing. Much better than sequins and fringe when twirling!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Great blooming blue-haired mommies!

I love the hairdos on the Mommy Seed packets. Now you can grow your own blue-haired mommy. You can even plant gray helmet hair. This next one looks like Donna Reed Show 1958 tv hair.









Cultivating real mommies is trickier than drawing mommy hair. Those thoughts will be in a future blog. Best wishes this Mother's Day weekend to all mommies and gardeners!


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Blooming mommies

Growing blooming mommies can be done easily in most home gardens with the proper cultivation techniques. The preschool students love the idea of a blooming mommy with flowers growing out of her head. Today they each made a portrait of their own blooming mommy on the seed packets for our special Mommy Seeds.

The Mother's Day projects are nearing completion. Like the Little Red Hen, the preschoolers grew the plants last summer, collected the seeds last fall, saved the plastic applesauce containers from their lunches this winter, drilled holes in the containers this spring, then filled them with potting soil, planted the seeds for the flowers, and marked the flowers with plant stakes. The Mommy Seed packets are the Mother's Day cards to accompany the gift of flowers.

The children are learning about cultivation, which they define as "taking care of the things we plant". At the same time, the children are being cultivated.

I've spread out my old American Heritage Dictionary, turned to cultivate and cultivation. Preschool is all about forming, refining, educating, fostering, and nurturing. To educate, we improve and prepare, plow and fertilize, tend and till.

Cultivation can also mean "socialization through training and education to develop one's mind or manners". Preschool is a never-ending battle for acculturation, which is "the adoption of the behavior patterns and norms of the surrounding culture". We aren't talking about diversity and multicultural awareness here. That is the territory of my eldest son working with university students. We are talking about not picking noses in public, and remembering to flush the toilet, the behavioral norms of the surrounding population of human beings! It's often a harrowing experience.

Till means to prepare for the raising of crops by plowing, harrowing, and fertilizing. It means to work at, to labor. It is definitely hard work to get preschoolers to stop picking their noses and start flushing the toilet. The word "till" seems to carry the frustrations of hundreds of generations of farmers on its back.

My young sons each went through a John Deere phase of fascination with farm implements. As a MOBO, I excelled in the choo-choo railroad fascination phase, and performed bravely in the truck stop big rig phase. I could identify every Matchbox car pulled from the three-gallon tub by year, model, and color. I really knew my hook-and-ladder trucks in the firefighter stage. I was damn tolerant in the military vehicle phase, if I do say so myself, waiting out G.I. Joe. I was never very good at farm implements, aircraft ID, or motorcycles, though. If I crammed for the test I could pass, but I never retained the information!

Harrowing experiences sometimes require using a plunger instead of a farm implement. A harrow is used to break and level plowed ground. It's a farm implement with heavy disks and teeth. To harrow is to inflict great distress or torment on the mind. Or perhaps on the foot. My mom used to receive an annual Christmas letter from an old high school chum. The best year the letter recounted the farmer dropping a sharp harrow upon his foot, but having to pull the harrow teeth out of the punctured foot so he could drive himself to the regional hospital because his wife couldn't shift gears on the manual transmission pick-up truck.

Sometimes on the commute home from work I chant, "It was a tough day, but at least I didn't drop the harrow on my foot." Being a mommy is a tough job, too. There were a lot of days when I felt I'd dropped the harrow on my foot as a parent. The most difficult years were those when I felt unable to shift gears.

Fortunately, there were many more days when I felt like flowers were blooming out of my head!


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Irresistible force meets immovable alphabet?

"Could we play the rhyming game again? Can we make pig wig?," the preK student asks.

"Absolutely! That would be fun," I say, impressed that she considers our recent word-building endeavor a game. "What do we need?"

"The at bat hat book and the immobile alphabet," she says, and scurries off to find them.

There's a funny mental image. It must be wheelchair day at the double A baseball game! I'm putting on my rally cap for this at bat.

Her "immobile alphabet" is really the classic teaching movable alphabet. Maybe writer's block is just a bad case of immobilized alphabet...
"Can I play, too? I played yesterday!," a second girl asks. She's a bit older, and can think of sat fat rat. Of course she may join us.

Speaking of fat rats and immobile alphabets, my Cingular cellphone service recently changed to "AT&T Mobility". What a silly name! The word mobility doesn't inspire thoughts of untethered phoning freedom. It instantly conjures its opposite, immobility. Oh, great. I've got a cellphone that needs a ramp, and I'm paying how much a month?!

Back with the rhyming preK girls, we play the "game" with at, it, ox, ig, og, ug. I'm delighted when they put their consonant heads together to figure out twig. Sure, they have some ideas that don't make words. The best is vog. "You know, Ms. Nancy, vog, when you can't see anything!" That vould be a Transylvanian fog.


Why am I wearing my at bat hat rally cap on this voggy day? CollageMama is celebrating in the dugout on the twenty-first birthday of her youngest son. Pour that nice ice lime rhyme cooler of Gatorade on her head!

Put the rhyme in the coconut, shake it all up. Put the rhyme in the coconut, call the doctor, wake him up.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Zits Pierce Caterpillar

My world is small. My students are small. Our discoveries and surprises are pretty big, especially with a digital macro camera setting. It's amazing how much life is going on inside the fence of a little preschool playground.

This caterpillar reminds me of Pierce, the much-punctured friend of Jeremy in the comic strip Zits. I don't know if it is an adolescent version of the stinging puss/asp/southern flannel moth caterpillar we found last fall. Pretty sure "Stinging Flannel Moths" would be a good name for a garage band, though.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Quail, driggle, enSkypeplopedia of knots

Rhyming words with the kindergartners is an enlightening exercise.

"Sun, fun, run, can you think of another word that rhymes?," I enquire.

"Quail", the student boldly avows.

Okay, but can you name these tools?

"Hammer, saw, clamp, screwdriver, driggle."

Driggle???

You know, for making holes.

Plugged in my headphones and made a leisurely call on Skype. Chatting away, I swiveled and skootched my wheely desk chair until I got the headphone cord completely wrapped around the chair wheel. Is Ma Bell in hell knotting macrame plant holders and cackling at life's complications since her breakdown? Will it take a driggle to get the cord untangled from the chair?

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Not so eensy weensy

This spider's body is the size of my thumbnail, and is patterned like a beautiful turtle shell. It's legs are very furry. The tension line for its web comes out of the end of a piece of rubber hose protecting a small tree's bark from the wire that braces it. Although I've seen the web almost daily since last summer, this is the first time I've actually seen the spider.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Midnight adrenalin

Long week with two annoying songs stuck in my head. David Bowie's "Ground Control to Major Tom", and John Cougar Mellencamp's "I Need a Lover Who Won't Drive Me Crazy"* were playing continuous loops and would not hey hit the highway.

Went to sleep early, but had dreams with whimpering children. I finally came awake at midnight realizing the whimpering was the dog next door. He's never left outside and rarely barks, but now the whimpering was escalating to barking.

The dog's owner is eighty-five years old, and his balance is poor. Had he taken the dog outside and fallen? Was Lassie trying to tell me Timmy was in the well?

The only way to see over the privacy fence is to climb up on top of my air conditioner unit. The poor dog was frantic seeing my head pop over the fence. The bedhead hairdo probably didn't help. My neighbor wasn't lying on the section of patio I could see.

Back inside I had to dig up the neighbor's phone number. Please answer, I thought. Don't make me call 911!

The story had a happy ending. My neighbor had just dozed off, forgetting to let his little dog back inside. He apologized, but I just thanked him for not being injured! Couldn't get back to sleep for a long time. I'm so grateful for the neighbors who have come to my parents' aid in recent years.

Timmy never was in the well, of course. Jon Provost, who played tv's Timmy for many years has a new autobiography, called Timmy's In the Well.

*I need a lover that won't drive me crazy
I need a lover that won't drive me crazy
I need a lover that won't drive me crazy
Some girl that knows the meaning of a
Hey hit the highway


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

I say flamingo, you say flamango

Montessori teachers and Scrabble junkies just can't help it. We see a group of movable letters, and we have to make new words. The sign originally had birthday wishes for the recipient of the shocking flamingo flocking, "WE FLEW IN FOR ____'S B'DAY".

A movable alphabet

The children were thrilled to find a pink flamingo flock in front of the school when they arrived. Some really believed the flamingos flew to school. Some fell in love!

A few plastic flamingos migrated from the front lawn to the playground. One preschooler wrapped her arms around a bird's neck and proclaimed, "mingo baby mine!"

The second morning we rearranged the sign letters to spell, "WE BIRDS PLAY NOW". We fixed a group of plastic birds inside a sparkly hula hoop. Plans to have jump-roping flamingos met technical difficulties.

"Mingos play!," the preschooler shrieked with glee. Usually we worry about baby birds imprinting on human rescuers. This time we were concerned that our little student had imprinted on the plastic flamingo. Would she be distraught when the birthday birds were collected by the rent-a-flock folks?

We didn't get a chance to arrange FLY BIRDS NOW on the sign this morning before the plastic flamingos were gone. Heading out to the playground for a session digging in the garden dirt, the preschooler lamented, "mangos gone, mangos gone". So sad, so sad. Mango must be the past tense of flamingo.

My sons never fell into a zoo flamingo lagoon, not even Danger Baby. Quite surprising, come to think of it. They had no accidental close-up encounters with roseate spoonbills or scarlet ibis in any aviary either. We were lucky to live near good zoos when the boys were little, and to receive family zoo memberships from generous grandparents so we could visit often.



The boys drew many maps of the zoos they knew so well in Omaha, Oklahoma City, and Dallas. They also designed some fantasy zoos based on their preferences and the need for frequent pit stops. They knew to put the picniks by the Aveary, Ellafuts, and Zeberas, but not too far from the rest rooms. The KagaRoos and Crokadils and Pigs should definitely be close to the Gift Shop (and more rest rooms)!



The Mingos and Mangos should be placed close to the playground and petting zoo! Should you need to draw a flamingo, the recipe is raindrop+S+4. Try blending purple, red, orange, and white with your pink for feather variations.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder